Studies in Premodern Sciences in Memory of Noel M. Swerdlow

Francesca Rochberg is Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emerita in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology and the Office for the History of Science and Technology. She is a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and winner of the John Frederick Lewis Award for Babylonian Horoscopes (American Philosophical Society, 1998). Recent publications are Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science (University of Chicago Press, 2016, 2020), Hellenistic Astronomy: The Science in Its Contexts (co-edited with Alan C. Bowen, Brill, 2020), which received the Choice Award as Outstanding Academic Title 2020), and Worldmaking and Cuneiform Antiquity: An Anthropology of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Rochberg is an Assyriologist and historian of science. Her work has consistently brought a cultural-historical perspective to the analysis of ancient science, culminating in her proposal to add the anthropology of science to currently existing history,  philosophy, and sociology of science methods.

• Part I: Babylonia.- 1 Early Babylonian Astronomy: Observations and Numerical Fits (Lis Brack-Bernsen).- 2 Neo-Assyrian Investigations into the Prediction of Eclipses (John Steele).- 3 Babylonian Horoscopy and Genethlialogy (Francesca Rochberg).- Part II: Greece.- 4 What Plato Meant by Saying That God Is Always Doing Geometry: Responses to the Question Posed by Plutarch in Table-Talk 8.2 (Liba Taub).- 5 Ptolemy’s Almagest and the Philosophical Schools of the Second Century CE: Apuleius of Madaura (Alan C. Bowen).- Part III: India.- 6 Visual Representations and Intertextualities in Second Millennium Sanskrit Eclipse Reckoning (Clemency Montelle).- Part IV: Europe.- 7 Levi ben Gerson’s Models for the Latitudes of Saturn and Jupiter (Robert Morrison).- 8 Calculating the Length of Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe: Arabic Astrology and Humanist Reforms (Margaret Gaida).- 9 Albertus Magnus’s First Lunar Model (Betsey Price).- 10 Historical Chronology before Joseph Scaliger: Jean Bodin and His Discussion Partners (Anthony Grafton).- 11 Writing “Celestial History” in Early Modern Europe (Florence Hsia).